Search Results

Violent crime is committed disproportionately by young men, but government never has conducted a coherent, aggressive campaign against serious juvenile delinquency. The fragmentation has been evident since the late 1960s, when federal authority was divided between health and justice agencies. A 1974 law created a federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to take charge. The law set progressive standards, but the administration of Ronald Reagan tried to kill the agency in the early 1980s and downgraded it after Congress refused to end funding. The Reagan Justice Department did forge an alliance with the MacArthur Foundation to start a long‐term study of juvenile crime's causes. Meanwhile, a steady increase in arrests of juveniles prompted to require that more teen suspects be tried in adult courts, even when studies showed the tactic ineffective in preventing repeat criminality. Congressional Republicans helped enact a large “juvenile accountability” program designed to provide federal aid to programs that got tough on young lawbreakers. Some measures failed on a broad scale, such as ‘boot camps’ aimed at instilling more discipline in delinquents. Despite many promising crime prevention programs, the Congress under Republicans control starting in 1995 generally refused to fund them. Juvenile crime arrests declined sharply since the mid‐1990s, but there was no solid proof of what caused the change, whether government programs, the improved economy, or a lower number of teens in the population.

The high crime rates of the early 1990s and a string of sensational crimes from coast to coast set the stage in 1994 for the most extensive and costly federal anticrime bill ever. Bill Clinton had made crime fighting a top priority, particularly after his health care reform bill had faltered. Congress had taken the initiative, led by Democrats Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware and Representative Charles Schumer of New York. The Democrats came up with a way to put $30 billion for anticrime programs into a ‘trust fund’ created by a reduction in the federal bureaucracy. Soon it seemed that Clinton's 100,000 community police officers, a Republican demand for more prisons, and various other programs to combat violence against women and other crime problems all could be funded. Republicans backed off support of big allocations for crime prevention ideas like ‘midnight basketball’ for teens, and the National Rifle Association fought against a proposed ban on assault‐style weapons. The result was a donnybrook that kept Congress in session through most of the summer. Republicans eventually won a series of concessions on funding, although the assault weapon provision survived and the law was passed. In the process, Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was seen as so flawed that the crime law played a significant part in the Republicans’ seizing control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections. Five years later, the crime law's impact on crime rates was uncertain; in fact, crime had begun to fall long before many of its provisions could have had much effect.

By 2001, the federal government was spending more than $5.3 billion each year to help states and cities combat crime, on top of the many billions allocated locally. In many instances, the money was going to programs that had not been shown to have much effect on crime. Many ideas have been proved worthwhile, however, and deserve more support. They include cohesive community anticrime campaigns, targeted drug treatment, prevention aimed at young people who show crime tendencies, plugging leaks in the criminal justice system, better news media reporting of crime issues, wiser use of the private sector, and dampening the political rhetoric on crime. As crime has become such a political football, relatively little attention has been paid to serious research on the issue compared with the amount devoted to medicine, for example. The danger in the early 21^st century was that as crime rates went down, government would downgrade even further its efforts to determine what worked and did not work in the past four decades. That could be a big mistake if crime rates started again to increase, a distinct possibility in view of downturns in the economy and more young people in the population.

In a legal system based on pure restitution and self‐defence combined with enhanced reliance on several property and freedom of contract, the ability to effectively prevent crime rather than deter its commission by ex‐ post punishment is greatly enhanced. Unlike public property, several property creates incentives to invest in crime prevention and the ability to exclude dangerous persons before they can act. Freedom of contract makes possible far more responsive law enforcement agencies than can be provided by a coercive monopoly. While pure restitution will not ‘deter’ all criminal behaviour, it is a fallacy to believe that increased deterrence invariably or logically follows, increasing the severity of punishment. Restitution increases the incentives to catch and prosecute defendants, thus increasing the rate at which legal sanctions are imposed.

Research suggests that it is time for police to shift from person‐based policing to hot spots policing. While such a shift is largely an evolution in trends that have begun over the last few decades, it will nonetheless demand radical changes in data collection in policing, in the organization of police activities, and particularly in the overall world view of the police. Hot spots policing should be privileged over traditional methods of crime prevention because it is rooted in an evidence‐based model of police practices, seeks to change crime places rather than criminal offenders, and for its potential to improve police legitimacy among community members. This final chapter presents summary arguments for hot spots policing and then discusses some of operational changes necessary in American police departments to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities for crime prevention in focusing on problem places.

Evidence‐based crime prevention is a part of a larger and increasingly expanding movement in social policy to use scientific research evidence to guide program development and implementation. In general terms, this movement is dedicated to the improvement of society through the utilization of the highest quality scientific evidence on what works best. In this chapter, the strengths and weaknesses of common research designs, such as randomized experiments, are described in order to place our discussion of prioritization of research findings in context. Results of three rigorous research reviews that assess the crime prevention value of hot spots policing are then presented. The important issue of whether focused police efforts in hot spot areas lead to displacement of crime to other locations or a diffusion of crime control benefits to nearby locations is also considered. Using scientific evaluation evidence as a criterion, there is substantial support for the crime prevention effectiveness of hot spots policing.

This chapter investigates how surveillance measures can reduce crime. It explains that public-area surveillance falls under the category of situational-crime prevention, which stands apart from these other strategies by its singular focus on the setting or place in which criminal acts take place, as well as its crime-specific focus. The chapter discusses the core assumption of both opportunity and informal social-control models of prevention that criminal opportunities and risks are influenced by environmental conditions in interaction with resident and offender characteristics. Thus, though street lighting, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, and some physical design changes to buildings and parks do not constitute a physical barrier to crime, they can act as a catalyst to stimulate crime reduction through a change in the perceptions, attitudes, and behavior of residents and potential offenders.

This chapter examines the political aspect of surveillance for crime prevention. It provides the background on the different forms of surveillance that are designed to prevent crime in public places, and charts key historic and recent developments which have shaped the use of the major forms of surveillance to prevent crime in public places. The chapter describes some of the most widely used crime-prevention systems, including street lighting and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, and evaluates their social costs.

This chapter discusses the methods used in the evidence-based approach to evaluating the effectiveness of crime-prevention measures, suggesting that crime prevention should be rational and based on the best-possible evidence, and that it is also important to use the most rigorous methods to assess the available research evidence. It contends that assessing the value for money of crime-prevention programs is closely linked to evidence-based crime prevention. The chapter highlights the importance of considering the issues of displacement of crime and diffusion of crime-prevention benefits in reviewing the effectiveness of the major forms of surveillance that are used to prevent crimes.

This chapter focuses on the actions that can be adopted to prevent crime. These measures are very closely connected to the crimogenic factors are considered to be responsible for overall functioning of the criminal justice system, as well as crime. It begins with a look at the approaches adopted for the prevention of crime, including deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. The next is on the role of police in preventing crime, which also addresses some practical issues. Popular crime prevention approaches and other community policing schemes that are adopted by the Delhi police are also considered. Finally, chapter ends with a section on the helpline services for certain groups and the deployment of police and the crime rate in Delhi.

The emphasis on putting places at the center of the crime equation represents a new way of thinking about the crime problem. This concluding chapter focuses on how this approach has added to knowledge about crime and crime prevention. It begins by reviewing the major findings of the present study and their implications for the understanding of crime and crime prevention. After summarizing the main research findings it considers their broad policy implications. It argues that crime prevention policy, and not just theoretical criminology, must begin to focus interest on crime at place. The criminology of place provides new and important insights into how society should deal with the crime problem. Finally, the chapter discusses specific limitations of the study and how future research can improve the understanding of the criminology of place. It argues that places should form a central concern of criminologists, policy makers, and practitioners in the twenty-first century.

This chapter is a four-part down payment on the comprehensive portrait of the New York experience that the two-decade history of policing deserves. The first section provides a short history of police methods and social science understanding of the effectiveness of police circa 1990 in the United States. It describes a crisis of confidence in orthodox theories of policing produced in large part by systematic evaluation efforts that deconstructed decades of received but unproven wisdom. This left the field more open to new leadership and ideas in the 1980s and 1990s than in previous decades, but without proven methods of crime control and prevention. The second section briefly describes the three major changes in city policing and when they occurred: changes in numbers of police, changes in organization and accountability, and changes in the strategies and tactics of street policing. These changes were the inputs of the new approach to policing—the series of shifts that were supposed to prevent and control crime. The third section shifts focus from how policing changed in the city to the question of whether the sum of changes reduced crime, whether the magnitude of police crime prevention in New York can be measured, and whether the effectiveness of different segments of the multi-part shifts in policing can be separately assessed. The fourth section addresses the lessons that can be learned from available data, as well as the things that can't be known until the slow and painful bean counting of policy science displaces storytelling and salesmanship.

This chapter covers discussion during and after the 1990s of factors that had long been considered as potential crime prevention—incarceration, demography, and economic expansion. With respect to these longtime candidates for credit in crime prevention, the 1990s were a cascade of best-case outcomes—high levels of incarceration, a drop in the proportion of the population in high-risk youth categories, and unprecedented prosperity for the same nine years that crime declined. With an epidemic of good tidings, a crime decline in the 1990s should have been expected, even though only about half of the actual crime drop appears to have been caused by favorable trends in longstanding correlates of crime rates.

This chapter reviews the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of improved street lighting to prevent crime in public places. The findings reveal that although improved lighting can be effective in reducing crime in some circumstances, it is still not clear what exactly the optimal circumstances are. Despite this, the chapter suggests that improved street lighting should be considered as a potential strategy in any crime-reduction program, in coordination with other intervention strategies.

This chapter reviews the scientific evidence on the crime-prevention effectiveness of three major forms of public area surveillance: security guards, place managers, and defensible space. There is fairly strong and consistent evidence that the defensible-space technique of street closures or barricades is effective in preventing crime in inner-city neighborhoods. Security guards represent a promising technique of formal surveillance when implemented in car parks and targeted at vehicle crimes, although the surveillance technique of place managers appears to be of unknown effectiveness in preventing crime in public places.

This chapter explores key policy choices and challenges that U.S. cities face in the use of major forms of public-surveillance approaches such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras and improved street lighting to prevent crime in public places. It suggests that not all forms of surveillance are as potentially intrusive, and raises questions about the infringement of civil liberties and other social costs. However, these social costs need to be weighed against any crime-prevention benefits that accrue from the different forms of surveillance.

This chapter describes the genesis of the ‘partnership’ approach and the recent rebirth of appeals to ‘community’ and ‘prevention’ within contemporary British crime-control policy and practice. It begins with a brief historical account of earlier forms of local governance in crime control and some of the transformations in policing and criminal justice which have occurred over the past 200 years. Then, it examines the recent interest in ‘prevention’, ‘community’, and ‘partnerships’ within crime-control policy. Each of these concepts is considered, outlining the most important policy developments, academic debates, and practical initiatives. The ways in which and the extent to which these notions have impacted upon different criminal justice agencies and their work are examined. Throughout the analysis, special attention is placed on the recurring critical relationships between formal and professionalized systems of crime control and the attraction of informal or community-based models.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about surveillance systems and crime prevention. It evaluates the effectiveness of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and improved street lighting in reducing crime in public spaces, and discusses the politics, theory, and methodology that are central to the study of public-area surveillance and crime prevention. The chapter explores policy choices, challenges, and future directions in the use of these public-area-surveillance methods and evaluates the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of the major forms of surveillance that are designed to prevent crime in public places.